Studying Financial Markets: Issues of Methodology and Disciplinary Boundaries (original) (raw)

Contributions of Social Studies of Finance to understand Modern-day Complex Financial Markets

MUDRA : Journal of Finance and Accounting, 2014

Although finance traditionally has been the domain of economics, understanding the various forces shaping the performance of contemporary financial markets require the use of a variety of intellectual perspectives from across other disciplines. The present article attempts to discuss the contributions of ‘social studies of finance’ in studying and interpreting the modern financial markets and it’s widely spread effects. This becomes of immense importance when conventional economics failed to express the social content of economic relations, and consequently to interpret the forces and conflicts at work in the economic process. This way, they help financial economics in framing and reframing it’s theories to explain and forecast the market in a better way.

Who’s afraid of Financial Markets?

2009

There has recently been an upsurge in social studies of finance, which maintain that economics performs, shapes and formats the economy and consider the formation and functioning of economic markets. They address market activities as global microstructures that are situated, reflexive accomplishments, focusing on the way in which the models, theories, procedures and techniques shape them. In all, financial sociology can attend to the interplay between actors’ cognitive states and the enactment of financial models as situated, historical processes. This promises to develop a broader social scientific account of financial markets as situated, sequentially achieved global socio-material actions.

Where do financial markets come from? Historical sociology of financial derivatives

2004

The thesis describes and analyses key events in the history of the pioneering markets for financial derivatives, paying particular attention to the influence of the Black-Scholes mathematical options pricing model on the formation of the markets. The historical narrative, focusing chiefly on the Chicago Board Options Exchange (CBOE), describes the transformation that markets for agricultural commodities underwent as organised trading in financial options was designed and practiced. Drawing on theoretical frameworks from economic sociology and from the sociology of science and technology, the thesis aims at expanding the explanatory scope of sociological accounts on markets. The work presents a new perspective for the understanding of today's financial markets: a multifaceted analytical description that combines the social, regulatory and organisational aspects of these institutions. After an introductory chapter, a literature review and a discussion of methodology, the empirical...